Failure to focus on economic goals costly to blacks, scholar says

STANFORD -- The decision of most black leaders in the 1950s and '60s to
concentrate on the pursuit of political and civil rights at the expense of
economic rights was justifiable, but has proven to be costly, says the
co-author of a new book on rights in America.

Although African American activists had good reasons to focus their
energies on securing voting rights and desegregating schools and public
facilities, that strategy too long delayed work on economic goals, such as a
national policy of jobs or income for all citizens, Stewart Burns said. Burns
is associate editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford
University, where he also lectures in history.

As Burns and his father, historian James MacGregor Burns, write in their
book A People's Charter: The Pursuit of Rights in America (published by
Knopf), the 20th-century black freedom movement "did not make economic needs
and aspirations a high priority. At first glance the abundance of movement
rhetoric about black poverty and joblessness and the obligatory demands for
economic betterment seem to belie this. But if one looks at deeds not words,
and to the deployment of movement resources, it is clear that economic rights
were slighted - until it was probably too late to make a real difference."

Not until 1966 did King begin to focus in a major way on economic justice,
which then became a major theme of his leadership for the last year of his
life, Burns said.

To have included economic goals in the black freedom struggle "would have
taken a kind of visionary leadership that was missing even from Dr. King
until a later point," Burns said.

"If the King of the late '60s had been able to go back in time to the late
'50s and start over, with the consciousness he had later about issues of
class and race, and how racism was tied in with poverty and militarism, I
think he would have pursued a very different course, because he would have
been able to see beyond the immediate period and look for what was coming
down the road," Burns said.

Although he did not live to see its fruition, the 1968 Poor People's
Campaign was King's finest hour, Burns said. It represented the maturity of
King's political thinking "when he came to see that all these issues were
linked, that economic rights were inseparable from political and civil
rights, that they all had to be integrated into a common cause, and in a
multicultural alliance of poor and disadvantaged peoples."

The compartmentalization of rights, with economic rights slighted, goes
back to the 19th century, Burns said. In the Reconstruction period after the
Civil War, just emancipated slaves and their supporters in the Republican
Party worked hard to achieve suffrage for black males. They succeeded for a
time, until Southern states systematically stripped voting rights from blacks
toward the end of the 19th century.

But while Republican officials were willing to work to add prospective
allies to the voting rolls, Burns said, they were not willing to grant the
kind of civil and economic rights "that would have led to greater integration
of freed African Americans into mainstream American society."

For example, he said, the Freedman's Bureau, set up by Congress to oversee
the social transition out of slavery, had as part of its mandate the
redistribution of abandoned and confiscated lands to poor Southern blacks who
needed land desperately. But this never occurred on more than a small scale,
he said, due to the resistance of entrenched landholding elites and to
Washington's lack of commitment.

A century later, rights again were compartmentalized and traded off
against each other, Burns said, in part because of decisions made by black
leaders, but primarily because of pressures from the federal government.

In the early 1960s, he said, then-attorney general Robert Kennedy urged
black leaders to give up efforts to achieve civil rights, such as
desegregated facilities, in return for federal support for voter
registration.

"It was in the interest of the Kennedy administration to increase the
number of black Democratic voters in the South since they were losing
conservative white Democratic voters," Burns said. The activist groups, after
much deliberation, decided to work for both voting rights and desegregation.

It is not only the government that creates and defines rights, Burns said
his book shows. Through their political struggles and reform movements,
citizens have been responsible for defining and achieving rights, he said.

Just as health care is not today considered a right, so a century ago
women's suffrage was not considered a right, Burns said. It took 75 years of
campaigning before women won the right to vote.

"It's likely that in 25 years we will see something like a right to health
care widely accepted in this country," although probably not incorporated
into the Constitution, Burns said.

About four years ago, James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns began
talking about writing a major book on rights in U.S. history, using the Bill
of Rights as the foundation of a longer history of how rights of all kinds
have developed and been transformed over the past two centuries. What they
originally envisioned as a three-volume series turned into a single 577-page
book.

The logistics of co-authorship were challenging, since James MacGregor
Burns lives in Massachusetts, where he is Woodrow Wilson Professor of
Government Emeritus at Williams College, and Stewart Burns is based at
Stanford. The two met every three months, but communicated primarily through
letters, a correspondence that the younger Burns said he has considered
publishing, since "the letters say a great deal about the whole process of
putting the book together and how our ideas evolved."

Thinking and writing about rights is complicated, Burns said, because
rights seldom appear full-blown, but emerge along a continuum from the time
they are first conceived or defined. For example, they may be enacted into
law but not enforced, or enforced but only halfheartedly.

Nevertheless, he said, the fact that rights are spelled out in the
Constitution or in laws or Supreme Court decisions is significant "and can be
a springboard to later efforts to enact stronger laws or to give people the
strength or moral authority they need to enforce rights more thoroughly or to
move toward the definition or assertion of rights in an entirely new area."

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